Now, we’ll talk about another area in Chinese cooking. There are numerous methods to cook Chinese food. There are stir fry, steaming, blanching, deep fry, shell frying and part cooked. Let’s go over the details of preparing a stir fried dish and then move on to the other areas.
For stir fried dishes, here are the steps that you should follow; 1) place all the prepared ingredients such as seasoning, sauces, flavor enhancer like ginger and garlic, within the reach of your arms, 2) heat the wok in high heat with a cup of damp paper towel, wipe the wok to remove any water, bacteria and metal taste from the wok. Continue to heat the wok until a little smoke appears. 3) Now, with approximately two tablespoons of cooking to coat six inches at the bottom of the wok with a spatula or rotate the wok to coat evenly. And then, add any flavor enhance like ginger and garlic followed by the first ingredient that takes longer to cook. Next, add more ingredients and mix it well. 4) Within each addition, stir to cook for five seconds before adding the next ingredient. After all the ingredients are added, cover to cook for 2-3 minutes. The cooking time depends on the quantity of food to be cooked. 5) Remove cover and add seasoning such as salt, sugar, pepper powder and soy sauce. 6) Mix it well and add thickener like cornstarch and water if desired. 7) Remove to a serving platter, garnish if necessary. Now, it is ready to be served.
Okay. How about steaming your Chinese dishes? How do you go about doing that?
In steamed dishes, 1) choose your steam or reservoir with a cover and a stand or also known as a tripod, to be placed inside the steamer to hold up the dish with the food to be steamed. 2) The food in the shallow dish or pie pan should be 1 inch smaller than the steaming reservoir. This will allow to steam on the inside and will come up to the top, then balance off from the cover and back into the food to be cooked. 3) Place enough water to a steam or reservoir just touching the top of the stand or tripod and then bring the water to a hard boil. 4) Place the dish with food on the stand or tripod. 5) Lower the flame to medium or to medium-low heat setting and the steaming time starts here. The flame must be high enough to create steam. It is important to lower the heat to prevent excessive condensation which will dilute the taste of the food.
Recently, people in China are concerned about the acid and alkaline intake from the cooking process. Blanching and steaming are considered alkaline or yin cooking and stir frying leading towards acid or yang. Now, the blanching method of cooking is very useful because many products need this cooking process to partially cook the food and then add the other ingredients to finalize the cooking process. What are some of the reasons why you’re doing this?
There are a couple of reasons why we do this. The first reason is the shortened time in the final cooking process. To do this, choose ingredients that take longer to cook than the rest of the other ingredients in your dish. For example, if you’re cooking a piece of broccoli and carrots, we would choose to blanch the carrot first because it’s more dense and heavier than broccoli. The second reason is that the color of the product would be more vibrant and it will have more crunchy texture. For example, if you plan to heat the pot, it’ll become brighter green.
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